The Unlearned Lessons Of the Twentieth Century: An Essay On Late Modernity

by Chantal Delson, Robin Dick (Translator)

Overview

In The Unlearned Lessons of the Twentieth Century, the sequel to Icarus Fallen, published by ISI Books in 2003, Chantal Delsol maintains that the age in which we live—late modernity—calls into question most of the truths and beliefs bequeathed to us from the past. Yet it clings to a central belief in the dignity of the human person, the cornerstone of the doctrine of universal human rights to which even secular Westerners still cling. At the same time, the process of dehumanization so evident in the ideologies and totalitarianism of the twentieth century remains at work. Delsol charges that it is not enough to proclaim human rights as a sort of incantation but that, rather, one must understand what sort of being the human person is if humans are to be genuinely respected. In other words, if the philosophy of human rights is to form the basis of Western culture, it must rest on a truer understanding of the human person than that which is taught—both explicitly and implicitly—in the contemporary West.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781932236460
Publisher:	ISI Books
Publication date:	08/28/2006
Series:	Library Modern Thinkers Series
Edition description:	1
Pages:	300
Product dimensions:	5.50(w) x 8.50(h) x 1.10(d)
Age Range:	18 Years

About the Author

Chantal Delsol is a professor of philosophy at the University of Marne-La-Vallée near Paris. Her first book to appear in English was Icarus Fallen: The Search for Meaning in an Uncertain World, the first book published in ISI Books’ Crosscurrents series.

Read an Excerpt

THE UNLEARNED LESSONS OF THE TWENTIETH CENTURY

AN ESSAY ON LATE MODERNITY

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By Chantal Delsol

ISI Books

Copyright © 2000 Editions de la Table Ronde
All right reserved.
ISBN: 1-932236-46-5

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Chapter One

INTRODUCTION

Imagine an heir who has just been informed that his inheritance consists of a trunk full of serpents.

Such is our situation at the turn of the century. The twentieth century, born in the worship of the future, is now ending with shame for the past and contempt for the future. Having been too often betrayed by our expectations, we look upon any idea of promise as a virtual betrayal. If hope can be compared to a well in a garden, it is as if we now felt that the well had been poisoned.

The rejection of hope manifests itself in two psychological reactions: The first consists in a revolt against those realities which, with the failure of totalitarian utopias, proved inescapable. Faced with the fact that the twentieth century was unable to produce an ideal society, we cry, "If human society is to remain imperfect until the end of time, then to the devil with hope: let us have utopia or nothing!" The second reaction consists in a wish to remain stock-still in the situation of freedom and well-being in which we find ourselves, thereby avoiding the temptation to embrace expectations that will once again turn out to be fruitless anddangerous.

And so hope today consists in doing without hope, of simply living without it. But is this really possible? Is it conceivable that man should be transformed to the point of no longer having a need for meaning? Could life's happiness henceforth be found in the absence of meaning? These questions have become common, and the supposed answer to them is yes. This is why it is not surprising that we sift through time and search beyond borders to see if societies, in previous times or elsewhere, might have lived or might still live without this strange thing called hope. This would account for the current fascination with Stoicism and Asian thought. One might even say that these two different philosophical expressions of self-sufficiency have been instrumentalized, reinterpreted with the express purpose of demonstrating that a society without hope remains viable. Hopelessness is renamed "non-hopefulness" in order to make the term somehow more optimistic or volitional.

To seek no more than what is "acceptable" or "in conformity with nature" is what links the Stoic to the Chinese philosopher (or at least what the West knows of Chinese philosophers). This is precisely what our moment in late modernity is looking for. The loss of collective undertakings must now be seen not as a harmful defection, but as the dawn of a new era ushered in by a new humanity. And so we are led to believe (and this idea is to be found as much in literature and sectarian theories as it is in philosophy) that the Chinese sage was able to do without a self, being, truth, meaning, logic, or any teleology whatsoever. In the presence of this belief, the postmodern self feels reassured and vindicated, living as he does in the banishment of truths, universals, and purpose. His nothingness finds, or at least believes it has found, an echo in the nothingness of age-old Chinese philosophy. In this sense, he believes that he represents a new form of being-not a lack of being. From now on he will be able to do without meaning and a future; he will live in the immobility of the present.

But beyond postmodern theory, what can history and geography teach us about the possibility that a society might live without hope? After all, most ancient human societies lived without any particular hope of improving their world, and even less of changing existence itself. They simply lived, and were content to continue in the ways and thoughts of their ancestors. They did not foresee for themselves a future beyond the next two or three generations. Even today, most non-Western societies would still live this way if the European idea of progress had not led them to expect, as a society, a better life, or "development."

After an accumulation of disappointed expectations, might we be in the process of turning back toward ancient times, times in which men were content to live out their daily lives without the expectation of a better future? If this were true, it would be a sort of relief, for it would mean that our common existence could find safe haven in the past without necessarily having to hope for a better life-which, for the time being, escapes definition.

And yet it appears that we cannot reassure ourselves with this escape mechanism. For ancient pre-European and non-European societies recognized a collective meaning, even if this meaning was not written into concrete historical temporality. They of course did not await the end of the world or the return of Christ, as did the Christians of the first few centuries, or a radiant future, as did the masses of the twentieth century. Still, their daily labor and the monotonous renewal of generations found meaning for itself in myth, religion, and wisdom. Without projecting hope onto a collective future, they no less hoped that each community would achieve itself in the order of things, in keeping with the community's view of the world and man's place in it. The religions, wisdom, and moral codes of ancient societies may seem to have been fixed in a frozen immortality, at least with respect to modern ways of thinking, but every event and every act sought its meaning within a cultural world in which time had its place.

Of course, the end of messianic and ideological expectations brings us back down to a day-to-day existence in which the only thing left is to live well; such a life includes material comforts and protections of all sorts. But if we were henceforth to wish to live without plans for the future, we would have to reappropriate the spiritual dimension through which life takes on meaning and goes beyond itself, even within daily existence. By contrast, the society of well-being alone, without hope or expectations, locks us into the material world and makes of us the sad heroes of emptiness.

Our present despair reveals the impossibility of living simultaneously in a world inherited from previous centuries and in the dream world of utopias: the former has been renounced and the latter has been definitively proved unachievable. Thus dissolves the common world of a society that now comes together only to celebrate its self-contempt, as seen in its revolt against the past, religious or totalitarian, and its revolt against reality restored, which, by its invasive presence, reveals the horrible excesses of utopias. A whole body of literature has arisen to vomit up the crimes of previous eras. It is as if the only thing that suits us anymore is what stands for the opposite of yesteryear and yesterday.

A new culture, a new way of living and thinking is slowly springing up in the fertile ground of these successive rejections:

? The linear and progressive march of time is giving way to fantasies of cyclical time. The steps of time, promises of progress and of limitless development, are being challenged and gradually replaced by the wheel of time, the eternal return of the same.

? Visions of what society might be are fading along with the idea of the future, which has become mere futurity. The individual clings to the ephemeral moment because he either cannot or does not want to define a purpose to which he might devote his fervor.

? Work as a way of shaping the world, as in the Promethean myth, is giving way to an apologetics of leisure or even of idleness, which is not contemplation but a willed and resigned quietude.

? The common vision of family based on father- and motherhood is giving way to a preapproved pattern of tribal relationships, devoid of hierarchy and durable, exclusive bonds.

? The idea that man has primacy over nature is being replaced by the equal valuation of all living things-including even inanimate reality, such as space and place.

This culture may be referred to as "late modernity," just as there was a "late antiquity." Even if it is impossible really to compare the present and the distant past, the expression comes to mind for more than one reason. Characterizing the present is always difficult. The expression postmodernity carries an ideological connotation: a rejection of the old world, and a consideration of the transformations underway as already completed and ratified. The idea of late modernity, by contrast, merely suggests the end of a cycle, without prejudging any possible turns of events or rebirths. It is late-this means that we are old, which indeed we are. But we cannot infer from this the idea of decadence, at least if we genuinely wish to distance ourselves from the phobia of decline that was so pervasive in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries: nostalgia has never nourished any culture, except through fits of aggression and revenge, as one might artificially drug a beaten animal. In this respect, we gain from the concept of late antiquity, which has recently replaced that of the Roman Empire in decline, the precious understanding of a mature or old era, without any pejorative connotation attached to the word "old." The concept of lateness does not express-at least not exclusively-a deterioration, an abandonment, or a sort of lassitude: it rather tells of the beginning of the replacement of one culture with another. The late hour of a historical time period is not like the weariness of old age: lateness in time is subverted time. Because cultures, in contrast to men, never really die, in an advanced age a birth takes place in the wake of the overthrow of the old. This birth presupposes the advent of a new age.

Late antiquity-that is, the Roman era from the third to the sixth centuries-shows all the signs of institutional decline, in the sense Plato meant when he stated that every institution ends up dying through the excess of its own principle. In this case it was death through excessive centralization, crushing taxation, and the triumph of a rationality that gave rise to injustice through its sheer inflexibility. It showed all the signs of aging in its affirmation of an art without meaning, a literature that was simultaneously pretentious and trivial, and a dwindling population. But above all, late antiquity heralded, and forcefully so, the advent of that Christian culture which would subsequently give birth to both Byzantine and Occidental civilization. In late antiquity, dawning Christianity subverted the spirit that had prevailed during the post-Republican and early imperial Roman period: the spirit of Stoicism and a diffuse pantheism, the search for happiness in the present moment. The new belief in a sole and transcendent God was bound up with the idea of salvation, which ceased to mean solely the restoration of physical health; it evoked eternal life, with a new vision of historical time, henceforth connected with theology, and the emergence of an affirmed stature for mankind.

In this regard, late modernity does call to mind late antiquity-as an aging world-even as it inverts the content. What emerged during the late Roman Empire-which is to say, what we inherit from Christianity-is today being subverted and replaced by a culture more or less comparable to what was subverted at that time: the Stoicism that had been born earlier amid the ruins of the democratic and republican city and the ideal citizen.

Thus, what was born in late antiquity is precisely what is dying in late modernity: the same European humanism whose end has been proclaimed. But is this to count the chickens before they've hatched, perhaps? This is what I dare hope.

Why reject the new spirit that is now rising from the ashes of the old? Why should we not make new cultural choices, even radically new ones? The answer is because in doing so we would have to give up what we wish to safeguard most of all. Indeed, within the present cultural evolution, which at times seems ineluctable, lies the snag of one immense detail. The society of late modernity, barren and revolted as it may be, is still animated by one common certitude, a conviction that was there at its birth, extends throughout its history, and is perhaps the only thing that remains anchored in its mental habitus: the dignity of the individual man. Late modernity cherishes this belief in spite of, even because of the fact that the twentieth century routinely encouraged the suppression of the individual as the "price to pay" for the realization of the future-the terrible notion of "human cost." The revolt against the perversions of European culture is fought in the name of the foundations of that very culture.

The idea of the dignity of the individual rests upon an image of man as a responsible subject and person. The dignity of the individual, that keystone of European culture since its origins (embryonic in ancient Greece, conceptualized by Christianity), rests upon an anthropology which makes of the human being a person, an entity possessing a sacred and inalienable value. European culture is the story of the epiphany of the individual who, with the rise of modernity, manifested the concomitant qualities of an autonomous subject, endowed with his own purpose and capable of independence of mind. However, the new ways of thinking and being that are appearing in our societies reject this very anthropology: the self dissipates into a vague pantheism, the subject is subjected to new constraints. In this sense, late modernity, in spite of its claims, has not attempted to replace the totalitarian regimes it has only just rejected: on the contrary, it has become an extension of them by pursuing the effort to efface the subject. Formerly, this had been a prerogative of totalitarian worlds.

Stated otherwise, we wish to escape our demons in order to restore the same human rights of which the past century made a mockery. Yet, in this effort to escape we are in the process of obliterating the very subject who legitimizes those rights. The aim of the present work is to expose this contradiction and its reasons for being: late modernity has rejected the terrorist aspects of totalitarianism, but it has not abandoned the ideological underpinnings of totalitarianism itself.

The key to Europe's future lies in resolving this contradiction. We cling to the certitude of the dignity of the person as a shipwreck victim clings to the overturned ship, because all other certitudes have disappeared or are slowly fading from view. But can the principle of personal dignity be maintained and secured without the cultural world that justifies and sustains it? This principle, the fulcrum of human rights thinking, is not an isolated and insular belief, a concept that can simply stay afloat on its own and find sustenance in nothingness. It finds its legitimacy within an architecture of meaning. The present contradiction, therefore, lies in the subversion of the very culture that sustains our last belief. We will obviously have to find a way out of this dilemma somehow, for if it is indeed possible to think in contradictory terms, it is impossible to live in contradiction without betraying oneself.

The dignity of man as a unique being without substitute is a postulate of faith, not of science. All of history demonstrates its fragility. The collapse of even a section of the immense architecture at the heart of which is the notion of human dignity suffices to weaken its defenses. Personal dignity requires the existence of the person; it requires a subject endowed with conscience and responsibility, one who answers as a witness to his acts; it supposes the moral unity of the human species and the specificity of the human vis-à-vis the animal. The idea of human dignity depends upon an inherited cultural world. Indeed, it was by destroying this heritage that Nazism and communism pulverized it.

Today, we still have not opened our eyes. Instead of shoring up the walls, signposts, and foundations of the principle of personal dignity, we brandish an incantatory and maladapted discourse of human rights. This discourse itself has become an -ism, inhabiting the very ideologies it seeks to combat, and whose work it in reality continues to advance: the destruction of the heritage in which the precarious principle of human dignity resides. A contradictory position to be sure, behind which the breaches of future dehumanizations are already widening: the notion of a human nonperson or "human unperson," for example, defended with all the academic seriousness of seductive theories. To ward off totalitarianism, it is not enough to dismiss it; totalitarianism must be replaced. The question of hope then ceases to be an academic debate. If we still have the value of personal dignity to defend, it becomes a question of responsibility: what must we become in order to safeguard that principle? Who is the person-subject, possessor of dignity, and what kind of common world can guarantee his existence?

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Excerpted from THE UNLEARNED LESSONS OF THE TWENTIETH CENTURY by Chantal Delsol Copyright © 2000 by Editions de la Table Ronde . Excerpted by permission.
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